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Robert writes: "If you didn't like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Electronic Arts has released the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault demo (133 megs) which is another game that uses id Software's state of the art quake 3 engine. MoH: AA is more realistic in nature than RtCW, and even has Steven Spielberg listed in the game's credits as it draws heavily from the movie "Saving Private Ryan.""

I played this demo for a few odd hours today, and thought it was freaking spectacular. Download it, and download it now. Graphics are as good, if not better than RTCW and the maps are by far, better. Go, download. You'll thank me.

From EA:
The demo will contain one of the eleven huge maps that will ship with the full retail version on January 22, 2002. You can choose the type of model that you want to be in the game, including Axis military models, and select from 14 different weapons including the Browning Automatic Riffle, Bazookas and the Colt.45.

So, you didn't play more than one map and your opinion probably can't be trusted.

Fileplanet's services have gotten progressively worse, as anybody in the gaming community will be happy to tell you. Starting their "personal server" service (which still isn't very good of a connection, I can tell you, having tried it), and then purposely crippling their public servers by forcing people to wait in queue in order to "encourage" use of the Personal Servers in order to get anything downloaded at all in a reasonable amount of time. There must be another link you could provide; I would rather not support Gamespy's profiteering if I can help it.

FilePlanet *used* to be good - until the dotcom crunch started and Gamespy felt they had to make a profit. So, by taking full advantage of revolutionary electronic distribution, they cut the number of servers, requires you to have a GameSpy ID (which they spam you without an opt-out link) implemented 'waiting lines, and turned the front page into a huge Java/JavaScript/Flash monstrosity. They then push their cheesy 'Personal Server' on you at every turn - they even have to back it up with Testimonials.

What's even worse is the GameSpy policy requiring *all* files on GameSpy-hosted networks to be on a FilePlanet server - this even applies to sites which are indirectly hosted by GameSpy (like skins.counter-strike.net). What's with the Penny Arcade art?

GameSpy are a bunch of money-grubbing bastards. Thanks for killing off halflife.net

No, the worst casualty of Gamespy was Team Fortress. Back in the day of Quakeworld TF the TF community was a strong, vibrant and highly personal community. Soon one of the better news sites at the core of the community got an offer from Gamespy to become the new Planet Fortress. TF was starting to take off and really hit the mainstream so most people welcomed it and saw it as a good thing. After a few months though it took over. Not because of better content, but because noone else felt the need to go anywhere else. It brought in new players, but only the most casual ones who didn't really care about adding anything. The old staff that had made the original TF Newswire great dropped off and were replaced by much less capable writers, no other site recieved any news and one by one everything else closed down and the community died. Eventually even Ethereal Team Fortress (the oldest site in the community) died and noone was left to care.

When it was Quakespy it was cool, when it was gamespy it worked, but when it had to become a network and a thing to make inordinate ammounts of money it killed everything like a kudzu.

1) Uhh, they "felt they had to make a profit," of course - otherwise they'd go bankrupt and have to shut down all their servers, and you'd get nothing.

2) I've never gotten a spam from them. It's opt-out at sign-up; just uncheck the "send me spam" box.

3) They haven't cut the number of servers. In fact they've doubled them over the past 2 months, adding multiple worldwide mirrors to their original two. They just implemented a queue because before you'd have to hammer their servers to get in, since they were perpetually busy. Now you can just wait in line and be guaranteed you'll eventually get in. And there's not much of a wait either - they're busy today because of the Medal of Honor release, but I still got it with no wait at 2am. My roommate got it in the afternoon with a 8 minute wait.

While I expect such an opinion to go over well on Slashdot, I think you do need to be called on it: If it's such an offense to you then how about you set up reliable, multiconnection servers to serve up a 133MB file to hundreds of thousands of people? Oh right: Bandwidth costs money, and you'd probably be paying about $0.10 a download.

I'm not a fan of Fileplanet's whatsoever, but I certainly don't despise them for trying to make it a workable situation.

Well think about it...
they are letting people download a bunch of files for free...
true, they got advertising, but considering the crap prices of advertising for the web..

The cheapest I've found from a shared hosting deal is $5 usd per gig over your limit. True, they get a discount, but its still a lot..

So, to round things out.. 133meg/1000 = 7.51..
or just round down to 7= there's some overhead ya know..

so they pay 5 dollars for every 7 people that download.. and the rate to per user to ad click is WAY higher then 100 views per click (and its probably MUCH worse for fileplanet). Not to mention, each ad click is at best 5-cents.. if they got an exclusive and on a shockwave, maybe 20.. Do that math, they are STILL not making any money from this..

5*14=$70 cost for 20 cents back?...

Mutliply that by THOUSANDS, and you got a big problem..

I think they should get a distributed network-type of thing.. A cross between swarmcast (with a proper client) and a special download utility. You know, that shows all those perdy graphs and a "karma" remembering that is in perportion to the account "level". The free accounts have to wait everyonce in a while when the "karma" hits a limit (to prevent leetchers), while the paying members get priority access and no limits..

This would cut down their bandwith usage by a LOT, give everyone faster transfer speeds and they would be able to put up more files!

Umm, I just downloaded it 3 hours ago, no wait. They had 4 free servers up, 3 had free slots.

And they haven't been crippling their public servers; in fact, they've doubled the number of free slots in the past 2 months. They've just implemented a queue because before the servers were always busy so people would keep hammering them trying to get in.

Fileplanet is the only place I've seen with so many demos available so quickly with so little download wait times. They serve literally gigabytes per hour, so if they're trying to make some money on the side to support it, while still keeping the service free for those who don't want ot pay, I fully support them.

Gimme a break, blah, blah, blah
Lemme ask you this, the demo is basically a hands on commercial for the game right? Well, let EA eat the cost of all the bandwidth to serve the demo. I mean christ, what kind of business model does fileplanet have? What dipshit investors thought that this was a good idea? We'll serve out games to people and eat the cost of the bandwidth. What dumb bastard with a fat account hears that and thinks 'sold!' ? I don't know about you but if I was a venture capitalist or even an angel investing in this venture, this would cause some concern on my part. If I ran fileplanet and EA wasn't kicking in on the bandwidth, I'd tell them to keep their damn demo. Ask EA if any of their other advertising (besides word of mouth) is free. If you want to subscribe and pay money for this service, personally I think you're a fool. If EA wants to release a demo of a game, let them pay for the bandwidth. When Ford comes out with a new car, the dealers don't ask you to kick in 5 or 10 bucks to have a chance to drive it do they? Of course not. Why should the business model of the internet be different? Sure it costs money for bandwidth, but hey, that's the price of doing business as a computer goods company. If you can't afford the cost of business then perhaps you need to get into something else.

That was one of the most moving parts of the film, it showed that the "soldiers" of the war were often little more than kids, away from home and afraid. I hope you're not trying to get a +Funny by making light of it...

The first few minutes were moving yes, but by the end of the opening scene I was more bored|numbed than disgusted, I had realized their point that war is a bloody and painful mess 5 minutes ago. If they'd made the scene a few minutes shorter perhaps they'd been able to keep me disgusted and moved as they continued on. But boring or making the audience numb is a bad start to a movie...

That was one of the most moving parts of the film, it showed that the "soldiers" of the war were often little more than kids, away from home and afraid. I hope you're not trying to get a +Funny by making light of it...--LEGO PORN!@ [corrupt.net]

You HYPOCRITE! First you condemn me for "making light" of a violent scene in a movie while participating in a discussion of a FPS video game, then you have the nerve to advertise Lego pornography [corrupt.net]!

Don't you realize that through your thoughtless words, you are legitimizing the objectification of Lego? Not only are older Lego sets being victimized, but tragically, innocent Duplo [lego.com] sets have been increasingly assaulted. These are preschool blocks we're talking about here, people! How long can we let this go on?

Remember, the Duplos of today are the Legos and Mindstorms of tomorrow. If they're assembled in disgusting and perverted ways now, how will they ever fully fit into Lego society (and bigger sets) later in life?

Perhaps Legos and Duplos can fit together, you pervert, but that doesn't make it right. Decent Slashdotters everywhere must act, and act now! Protect our preschool blocks from abuse! STOP DUPLOITATION!

actually the game doesn't include much blood (if at all) because the Nazis used to wear lots of clothes when they were out in the war and too much blood gushing out of them would be unrealistic as the cloth would stop most of it coming out.

This game is ultra realistic (up to a point and not in the style of one hit one kill factor like Flashpoint) so all of these factors have come into play

How could one not like RtCW? I think its the best shoot-em up game on the market today. Before RtCW was out, UT was clearly the best game out there, even better than Quake III that came out almost a year later than it. The Unreal engine was incredible. Then id makes the QuakeIII engine which uses OpenGL as the main rendering API and its really nice and all, but UT was just a better game than QuakeIII.

Finally, RtCW comes out and its a lot better than UT. It's a shame really that it took almost 2 years for a game to be UT, but RtCW finally did.

However, I will continue to play UT (as I am in a clan) but I think in the coming months, many UT clans will migrate to RtCW and then finally back to UT when UT2 comes out.

Its not so much a matter of not liking RTCW..Its a matter of wanting a more realistic game. RTCW is a good shooter, but its a cartoon. You can take 50 bullets and live and you fight undead zombies and such.

Medal of Honor is for people who want a more realistic FPS experience that is more about stealth & tactics than running around with a Really Big Gun. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I love to run around at 60 MPH with a Really Big Gun, but sometimes I like to play games that are a bit closer to real-life simulation.

I have trouble understanding how someone can like UT better than Quake 3. It's like they threw in every stupid idea they had without bothering to think if it would improve the game or not. Quake 3 was simple-minded, but they made it work. Rather than having a hundred weapons, they used a few good ones.

I tried to explain why I didn't like UT to a UT fan once and for whatever reason he couldn't understand me. All he could say was "But in Unreal Tournament you can shoot a bunch of rockets at once!"

EA Games to release a one level internet multiplayer demo this Friday!

The demo will contain one of the eleven huge maps that will ship with the full retail version on January 22, 2002. You can choose the type of model that you want to be in the game, including Axis military models, and select from 14 different weapons including the Browning Automatic Riffle, Bazookas and the Colt.45.

Woah, settle down, this is test to see who actaully read the links and who didn't... what date was this written on their site? Does it work? Is it fun?

For screenshots and more information on multiplayer modes for the retail version, please click here.

Um...I didn't like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. At least, I didn't like the mutli-player demos that were out there. Sorry, but I've played that game already. Counter-strike, TFC, and so on have already done a much better job of that sort of thing - wrapping up the same gameplay in an old skin just doesn't do it for me.

The single-player aspect of the game still interests me (after I work through the rest of the stack...*sigh* no job, and still not enough time to finish all the games I've got...) but I'm not seeing anything to get super psyched about.

The single player levels are kind of nice although the AI of your opponents is rather low. Getting through the levels isn't really much of a challenge except for a few isolated spots where you overrun by hordes of lame monsters. Without the good graphics it wouldn't be much of a game.

I actually liked som of the levels. There is one where you are supposed to sneak past some guards and snipe them in such a way the other guards won't notice. That was kind of fun. The main problem with rtcw is that after about 10 hours of gameplay you're done. Since the levels are so easy, replaying is not much fun since you know where all the soldiers are and how to find your way to the level exit.

The multiplayer mode is not for me. I never liked teamplay because most of the time your fellow teammembers suck and it takes way to much time become effective as a team. I prefer plain deathmatch: spawn and go on a kamikaze killing spree. The problem with rtcw is that it doesn't offer deathmatch and that the teamplay is particularly nasty because of the player classes. It bored me within two minutes. Basically I spawned, watched others shoot each other and then finally really spawned into the game (i.e. not as a spectator) in an impossible position with almost no weapons. Naturally since I didn't know the level, the guns and my team members I got killed almost instantly. That means more watching others play (for some reason they don't let you respawn immediately). At that point I realized rtcw multiplayer was crap. Of 20 minutes online gameplay, I had not had more than 5 minutes worth of action, not my idea of a good time.

this is the first time that i couldnt find a download somewhere else and had to resort to signing up at fileplanet. I had no idea that there was a WAIT for downloads!..and whats this personal server crap? geeze. more mirrors for the download would have been nice.

it does have a hidden team deathmatch feature. You can read the details on Blue's News [bluesnews.com].:)

I wished the company released a team play option because Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RTCW) looked like a winner with its team based option. I wasn't expecting it to be that good. I couldn't conclude if RTCW is a winner since I haven't tried MoH:AA's single player and teamplay multiplayer yet.

I tried to download the game, but of course Fileplanet is full, but they would nicely let me download it, if I signed up for thier service. Not today... Ok, lucky BluesNews had a link that worked. 3 hours later I was good to go.

Launched the server, didnt know how to tell it private, so I reduced it to 4 guys. Within 1 minute the server was full. Everyone also just downloaded and I was the only server that had a good ping in Seattle. lol Played for 2 hours, learning, then found a 12 person server, much better.

Likes..:)
Well, its not quake3 with powerups, you get killed quick. You have to watch yourself, its like more like CounterStrike in that respect. Good GFX, fast game play, the level was just made for deathmatch.
Respawn points are rooms in back, so you dont get spawn killed. That was a MAJOR change to most multiplayer games.

Dislikes:
The only level was kinda small, After getting killed by a damn sniper in a good spot, I switched to rockets, (only get 6 shots) and spamed hit window. Dead.:) Started to play it like quake3a and that was fun for awhile. I finally switched to the machine gun, started to do head shots, and stayed in the hallways. Thats when my points went up, and stopped getting killed. I think the shot gun should be tweaked, up closed dead, farther away, usless. Also taunting the enemy in german was a neat idea.

But all the new games, Serrious Sam [croteam.com] 2 beta engine ROCKS. It actually lets you pick the refresh rate, and turn on all the options to make it look freaking awesome. Even plays OGG music files too.

Also, New York Racing [ferrago.co.uk] came out, its about the movie the 5th element, but a race game with floating cars. Gotta pick that up, the demo was really good. Not alot of news about it, but read one on ISO News [isonews.com]

Also, New York Racing [ferrago.co.uk] came out, its about the movie the 5th element, but a race game with floating cars.

So I read the short review of the game you linked to at ferrago.

In that tiny review I counted three mentions of Luc Besson's vision of the 5th Element's future metropolis, but nothing of Eric Hanson [loop.com], the lead artist who brought that vague vision to life.

Sure, directors play an important role, but too often are the real artists forgotten.

I've played the demo for a couple of hours. The Stalingrad map is a little too closed in for my liking, and I just cant WAIT to try out the Omaha Beach map.

My biggest beef with the RtCW MP test was that the 'storm the beach' was just so..narrow. From the screenshots of MOH's Omaha map, this wont be an issue, and hooboy am I looking forward to that. Hopefully the single player game is engaging as well.

And a seriously positive thumbs up for the player models. I love that they arent just going to be generic GI's and Nazis.

Whether or not the game is good or bad wholly depends on the connection speed. When there is no lag this game is pure brilliance! Incredibly fun! When the ping drops, however, it's not really worth bothering with. With a bad ping, it's hard to hit people and the movement is jerky and kindof replays over and over (from your viewpoint) until the server has acknowledged any movement.

Hopefully they can straighten out the lag issues before the game's release, but for now to lessen lag, I recommend that any cable servers have a maximum of 6 players. I was hosting a game and when the players jumped from 6 to 7, everyone's ping doubled instantly. When there were only 6 player's again, things returned to normal.

That is correct. This is what the "game industry" prefers, since it involves near zero risk and comes with a built-in excuse (in the form of a great "yeah, but" remark) for instantly rejecting anything "new" WITHOUT having to think about it.

Fortunately, the GameCube seems to be cracking this stigma a little. Too bad I can't get it on the net yet.

It's not so much the Gamecube that's "cracking the stigma", as Sega. Chu Chu Rocket, Jet Set Radio, Super Monkey Ball, etc. All Sega games. I'm assuming that you're referring to Super Monkey Ball, and possibly Pikmin, when referring to the GameCube breaking the trend, but look at Rogue Leader (hey, it's a sequel to Rogue Squadron!), Wave Race: whatever it's called (look! sequel to Wave Race on the N64), and Super Smash Bros. Melee (look! sequel to Super Smash Bros.!). The Gamecube is just as "me-too" as any other platform. It's the game developers that have to make the difference. Thankfully, Sega is playing all the consoles (Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube, Chu Chu Rocket and Sonic on the GameBoy Advanced, Shemue II and Jet Set Radio: Grind on the XBox, and I don't remember what they're bringing to the PS2, besides things like the Crazy Taxi series (was that Sega?)).

I miss the days of 'Garage Developers' creating shareware games on BBS's.

Check out Garage Games [garagegames.com]. If the next John Carmack (mmm... Commander Keen) is going to be found anywhere, it's highly likely it'll be there. Sure, you can license the Tribes 2 engine (or V12, now the "Torque Game Engine", as it's not completely the T2 engine) for cheap, but there are plenty of other engines, or you can write your own. Also, check out places like FlipCode [flipcode.com], GameDev [gamedev.net], and GamaSutra [gamasutra.com] (probably need a free registration to read most of the interesting things) to see what's going on in the world of amatuer graphics and games development (the first two more than the third, as gamasutra seems aimed more towards the game development professional). There's some crazy stuff going on, and lots of great little games that you'll never see elsewhere (the games, that is, not always the concepts. You'll see a lot of tetris clones, defender clones, whatever. but every now and then a completely off-the-wall concept shows up).

Nope, the first poster was right. It's not anti-aliased. Yes, the XBox can do anti-aliasing (2x, 4x, and nVidia's quincunx), but no launch titles (or any titles yet, for that matter) use it. Why? Performance issues, among other things. To take Halo as an example, had Bungie added anti-aliasing, it would've needed at least another month of playtesting and tweaking to make sure that the framerate stays acceptable in all situations. Bungie obviously didn't have that time. Along with time concerns, more importantly is performance. Anti-aliasing is expensive (4x anti-aliasing of a 640x480 scene means you're rendering at 2560x1920. That's a lot of pixels to push. Yes, you can use a lower sampling rate, but those just don't look as good). However, as developers get used to the XBox hardware and begin to write their own native libraries (which they will, you can be sure), they'll be squeezing more and more out of the XBox. At a certain point in the future (I'm guessing roughly six months from now, but I'm by no means an expert), it will be possible to tweak out Halo- or DOA3-level graphics with AA at the framerates Halo or DOA3 play at now. The key is the fact that the XBox is a console, and so will be a static piece of hardware for the next 5-6 years. That means developers can safely write directly to the hardware. Even though most of the XBox components are familiar to developers, I'd wager that the reason most (all?) launch games used DX was because few developers have the experience of writing directly to p3 or geforce hardware. They'll learn, and things will get even better.

That said, the Gamecube doesn't have anti-aliasing either, to my knowledge, nor does the PS2 (okay, so I'm sure there are some PS2 games that do AA, but that's due to experience with the platform. But look at earlier PS2 titles, like DOA2: Hardcore. Jaggies galore!).

However, as developers get used to the XBox hardware and begin to write their own native libraries (which they will, you can be sure)

Umm.. no they won't. The X-box is a specific setup PC in a box from a development point of view. Developers could just go and write new libraries, but they haven't done so for nVidia based PC games.. so its unlikely they will for the X-Box.

...that graphics don't matter. Two articles back, there were comments about the "Uplink" game, which probably didn't use a state of the art game engine.

The positive-negative ratio of comments here looks about the same. People complain anyway.

All companies have to do is look to the Final Fantasy movie for further proof. Best graphics possible with modern technology (and budgets). Didn't translate into hyper-success though, despite "critical acclaim."

Seems to me that every FPS game that comes out is touted at the greatest thing since sliced bread. At the end of the day though they never live up to the hype. Recent examples include Max Payne, RTCW and I'm sure many, many more...
Is it just me, or is every new FPS supposed to be "revolutionary" yet ends up being tired old dross...?

I can tell you I am fed up with these games that continuously give the image that war is fun and enjoyable. I have had many excruciating experiences in the trenches and in the battlefields. Please, find some other activity instead of wasting your time with this game and subjecting yourself to the idea it gives you of war.

Please find some other activity than whining to a bunch of kids on Slashdot.

Seriously though, many video games and movies glorify things that aren't really glorious. Take Ghost Recon, the new game about the speical forces. Or how about GTA3, where you are a street thug. Hell even Civ 3 is glorifying something that, in all reality, sucks (the conquest of nations).

For that matter, all shooting type games are fake and glorify killing in some way or another. I assume you've shot a real gun and know how very different it is from how video games and movies show it. Well, guess what? So have I. Doesn't mean I'm going to get pissed off about it. Entertainment like this is to escape reality, it is not designed to mirror it.

Look, I realise that war is hell and I'm sure you had no fun at all in WWII. However that does not mean that you should bitch and whine about anything that makes light of it. If you don't like the game, find it painful, etc then by all means, don't buy it or support it. But please, it is just silly to demand that the rest of the world does the same. Almost everything in the world hits a nerve with someone. IF we try to sterilize our culture so noone ever gets their feelings hurt, we have nothing left.

The Q3A engine is by FAR the most state of the art engine around today. There is not one single engine that comes close in terms of performance, visual quality, flexibility, and portability as the Q3A engine, especially considering that it is 3 years old and Q3A was developed with hardware of the time in consideration. Now it can be pushed much further, which is nicely demonstrated by RTCW.

I've played all the latest games, Max Payne, etc., some are really good but could have just as easily been done with the Q3A engine. And in the case of most, would have been MUCH better had they not been designed for Direct3D.

Especially Max Payne. I own it for the PS2. For the PS2 the graphics have been severely cut back, and it still has some slowdown problems. Q3A for the PS2 looks absolutely amazing, far better than Max Payne, because Max Payne was designed with ONLY Direct3D in mind, which severely limits it. BTW, it's still a good game on PS2, just could have been better had it not used a proprietary 3D api...

Supposedly, Direct3D out performs OpenGL, but that just doesn't hold up much water with Q3A STILL being the best performing game engine around 3 years after it's release.

i haven't played the demo yet so i can't tell how good it is but i have been playing day of defeat for half life for a while and imho it kick ass. it has team commands in both languages english and german and it realstic but fun(until you don't get pissed off when you find out you can;t jump very high cause of the stamine bar). it a real neat mod, and it has top notch boards and graphixs for a 3-4 year old engine it still looks good. i am looking forward to allied assualt for it's single person mode cause the first two for the ps1 was the shit, hope they brought that quality to the pc. well if the teamdeath match mode sucks for moh:aa i'll stick to Day of defeat for my WWII nazi ass kicking.

OK so I'm biased being on the Day of Defeat mod, but why play this when you can play Day of Defeat (DOD)? It's a HL mod, and the most popular mod under CS and TFC right now - most popular non-retail/commercial mod there is.

DoD 2 will be released in a few weeks, and I gotta tell you, if you like what the "professionals" have done w/MOH and RTCW, wait till you see what the "amateurs" have done with DoD.

So some of us DoD ppl played around w/the MOH demo BTW. One thing we noticed? You can rocket jump with the bazooka! I know my grandpappy used to tell me stories....

"Ya sonney, let me tell you about the time I did a rocket jump right over a german squad's head! Landed on their bunker, stuffed some grenades down the stack, and caught 'em all with their hands on their weinerschnitzel!"

Seriously. If you like this kinda game, want one that runs on a LOT more servers, and kicks more ass, play Day of Defeat. I'm sure the MOH and RTCW dev teams have been playing it:^)

Who cares if Spielberg is in the credits? He has no gaming credentials at all (unlike contemporary Gerorge Lucas). Well, none that I'm aware of anyway. After playing the demo I can tell why he's listed: the publisher is trying to compensate for a lackluster product.

Granted, different strokes for different folks, but IMHO the one-word summary is: weak. The graphics are average (how bout those closets all with the same perfet purple pattern wallpaper, and the player models), the multiplay/netcode buggy (talk about lagging, even with reported 70ms pings), and the gameplay is unexciting (that's "always run"?). And then there's friggin Gamespy, which as far as I'm concerned is to online gaming what AOL is to the Internet. Basically, unlike RTCW multiplayer test, final, and demo, which allow collection of internet servers in-game, selecting multiplayer Internet with MOH, assuming that you don't have a specific IP#, closes the game and invokes Gamespy. You then have to configure Gamespy and select a server, etc, a big giant friggin pain IMHO, and a ridiculous requirement. Reminds me of the days of Descent 2 and Kali. Deja-vu all over again.

Unfortunately, MOH's been billed as a demo, but it looks like a beta. Hell RTCW multiplayer TEST was miles ahead of this thing. I hope that they can refine it before it's release, cause if what I've seen is close to the finished product I'll stick with RTCW.

RTCW has it all over this demo: atmosphere is the first thing I noticed upon my first beach-storming in RTCW multiplayer test: everything I experienced, except for the venom:) , fealt like all of the old war movies I've seen. The game just fealt, and feels, like I've always imagined the ETO in WW2 was. Sadly, MOHAAN misses the mark widely.

I tweaked the config a bit before starting: res set to 1024, changed connect to Cable, turned up the graphical bells/whistles.

I'm at a LAN party right now, and about half an hour ago, we were playing the Medal of Honor demo. I was shot point blank in the face by someone carrying a rocket launcher point blank. I died. He did not.

If one fired it point blank into someone it wouldn't explode because it hasn't armed yet - it might turn the enemy's face into paste but it would not most likely kill the firer of the weapon. (Usually this arming is accomplished by having the projectile rotate a certain number of times before it arms...I think it is 30m for both the 'AT-4' and M203 (the grenade launcher that is under the 'M-16') rounds.) If you're really interested I can look it up. Just did. It's 10m (33 feet) for the 'AT-4'. See http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/at4.htm We didn't have the fancy Starlight scope on it by the way.

One aspect I would be interested in is if you can die by standing behind it. In RtCW you can't and that's a shame because that is one of the vital things one has to remember about 'bazookas' - the stuff that is coming out the front is balanced out by stuff that is coming out the back. Think of a jet - same principle (Newton's Third Law).

BTW, I've shot about six AT-4's in real life. Quite fun but I was only able to hit the vehicle (around 200m away) 2/6 times. I was just too excited to be firing the damn things in the first place. Ask a TOW missileer how many times he has fired an actual TOW missile in a four- year period and you'll understand.

It feels almost the same only with incredible graphics. This could be a good thing because DOD was the best thing since CounterStrike until Wolfenstein came along.
Deathmatch sucks though. Even team deathmatch sucks. At the very least they need to have a DOD type (capture and hold) teamplay mode. If not, Wolfenstein wins. I'm really starting to enjoy multiplayer Wolfenstein.
Oh... And they REALLY need to make crouch in Medal of Honor momentary and not toggle!!!!! (at least give us the option)

I played the deathmatch version a bit Friday morning just after 12 PM, but have been waiting since to try the team play. If you take a look around there are a few servers which you can play Allies vs. Nazis, but I can't figure out how to set that up (in the demo it claims it is restricted). My guess is you have to edit a.cfg file somewhere.

Try the team play out and you'll be greatly rewarded. The straight deathmatch is entertaining as long as Quake 3 was. The real heart of the game is, of course, in the various team modes and it is surprising that you cannot (easily) play this in the demo. And that's unfortunate.

Now read this
Just because I disagree with the author, is no reason to give me bad charma.

Let me dive into my review of this POS game.
I found out about it on slash, went to the fileplanet link (me and 5 buddies share 1 account FSCK you fileplanet) and read War and Peace while it downloaded.
The installation went ok, but it did seem just a little weird that there were two progress meters, one running in the background at %100 while the other one went about installing. I know why this is, it just extracts the install files to a temp directory.

Now one of the files I noticed the installer get stuck on for a while was RenSizzlefeb.mpg. Upon closer inspection I found out that this was a 9.1 meg file that wasn't even part of the game! Just 9.1 megs of downloading wasted on something EA could have just provided a link to. Way to bloat EA!

Not even through with the install and this game is making me mad. My shock at the cross marketing EA does is apparent by the installer telling me the only way I can find other people to play online is by installing gamespy! Not that that's a bad thing just why not build the game browser into the game itself like RTCW? Why should I have to sit through annoying banner ads just to play a game?

The graphics in the game really aren't that good! No i'm serious here compared to RTCW they just plain suck! You look at closeups or side profiles of the soldiers they just look like they've all got flat faces! No definition on the nose, ears. To be honest I could not tell where the helmet began and where the forhead ended. At least in RTCW the helmet is very distinct from the rest of the head.

While we're on the subject of the player models, lets get to texturing. The game uses compressed textures which does not do a thing for the game. The skin tone of the faces is monotone I.E. no shading, maybe there is but its not that great. In fact I think the player models in unreal tournament blow the models in MOH away tenfold.

Controls are shitty and unresponsive. For some reason there is a lag between the time I move my mouse and the graphics on the screen update.

About the only good thing I found in the game was the netcode. People did run around smoothly without much skipping around. Definetly a lot better than RTCW test one. Yet with the lag from the controls it doesn't really make a difference now does it?

Before ppl start telling me my PC must suck, trust me it's beefy. Some ppl make up for their shortcomings with their cars or other big things, I do it with my pc OK?

I know this is just a first test but jeesh considering this is EA, the M$ of the gaming industry they would have at least done a little more in house testing on it.. Nah with the economy I guess they don't have the cash to hire as much QA as normal but this game should have been stopped at the router before it was distributed. Not a good call EA, shoulda worked on the textures a bit more.

Get a grip. That doesn't mean there won't be a Linux version. By FAR, most gamers use Windows. Guess who they are going to try to entice to buy this first? It's not rocket science. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a Linux user, but common sense has to take over sometime for somethings..)

The Q3a engine, if im not mistaken, is cross platform. It is reasonable to assume they will make a Linux version.

Don't get all high and mighty about Linux, not everybody uses it. I *can't* use Linux because I'm an artist and I use Lightwave and After Effects. Niether are available on Linux right now, so I'm a Windows guy. Do I want to be? Not really. I'm not ashamed of it either. Windows 2000 is surprisingly good.

I think it's pretty clear that Slashdot is a news site. It may be polarized towards Linux, but that doesn't mean every news story has to be about it. It would have been pretty silly for Slashdot to post the WTC attack and have to find a reason why it's Linux related.

People always bitch about games that are too real. Guess what? People don't actually run 40MPH like they do in Quake..yes, that's the actual estimated speed in Quake. People are always 100% accurate with crosshairs... Guns aren't 100% accurate to sites like they are in Quake-like games.

Oh yes. Operation Flashpoint.
That's more of a war sim than a war game. Whereas in stuff like RtCW you can run around blasting away at everything that moves, absorbing masses of bullets, in Flashpoint you spend a lot of time crawling around slowly hoping to see the enemy before they see and shoot you. Sometimes you never see the enemy soldier who shoots you. One bullet, and that's it. Game over.
It's probably the most anti-war war game, as it doesn't glamourise war.
Great game. Difficult, yes, but a good depiction of combat, as I'd imagine it.